Windows Won’t Boot: mup.sys

The other night I walked away from my Windows machine for a brief period of time. I came back to find that the status indicator on the tower was solid (the computer was busy doing something). When I went to go back to what I was doing with the computer, the machine kept coming to a crawl. I rebooted the machine into safe mode, but it just hung on the Windows splash screen. I tried again this time asking it to load the command line so I could read where exactly it was getting hung up. The culprit — mup.sys

Windows problem? Hardware problem? That’s what a quick Google search seemed to indicate. The articles I read indicated that it could be a corrupt harddrive (solved with OS reinstall), or faulty hardware.

Fortunately, I had the brilliant idea to install Wubi a few months back so that I can boot into Ubuntu. I figured if it were a hardware error, I shouldn’t be able to boot into this partition either.

Solution — upon booting up Ubuntu, I was greeted with a message saying something to the effect of ‘Ubuntu found errors on the Windows partition and will repair’. A few minutes later, I was in Ubuntu and even a few more minutes after that, I was rebooting into Windows. Here’s to another reason to get on the Linux train.